Open letter to online libertarians – part 2 – the distilled points

Some of you asked for this, so here you are. This is my beef with you lot, in general.

1. You are concerned with things that are not even real. You waste a huge amount of time swapping abstractions with each other. This is not only a waste of time in itself but it affects the way you view any given issue. When you hear Obama say “America will benefit if we share the wealth about a bit” your reply is likely to be closer to “Fuck you! Taxation is theft” than “There is no ‘America’, there is no ‘we’, and all stealing is wrong, regardless of who does it or what they call it”. My fellow writer Sovrano and I theorise that this is because very few of you have any exposure to continental (European) philosophy, in particular the post-structuralists and the existentialists (e.g. Max Stirner), whose work can show you the difference between objects and concepts, and the correct language you should use if you don’t want your brain to become befuddled with stuff that simply isn’t real.

3. Your activities add up to almost nothing. Sweet F.A. As I’ve pointed out before, the sum total of online activity by internet libertarians adds up to a very large amount of time and energy, yet this energy is being lost since what you are investing it in is totally unproductive. In particular, those of you that haven’t woken up to the FACT that electoral politics is a moral and practical disgrace, are wasting unfathomable quantities of energy chasing a unicorn. Will you not even permit me to give you some advice on how to better channel your energy?

4. Most of you support a ‘big tent’ approach, and will allow anyone to ‘be’ a libertarian as long as they make sounds about ‘freedom’ and use the L-word identifier. What you so far have not worked out is that this approach is completely stalling you. You are surrounded (metaphorically and physically) by loads of people who, if the society around you was radically changed, with have VERY different views to you about what should then follow? How can you have ‘freedom in your lifetime’ if you are working with people that have totally different visions of what that would actually be?

5. You treat me like some sort of irrelevance because to you, I ‘am’ a nobody. But how does a ‘nobody’ become a ‘somebody’? By people listening to what they have to say. I’m not interested in becoming a ‘somebody’ in the sense of being an icon, a leader, or any such bourgeois notion. I just want you to engage with the ideas I am sharing because I really believe they can help you change the way you think FOR THE BETTER, improve your methodological approaches FOR THE BETTER, and develop some activist strategies that stand a reasonable chance of success. What do I get out of this? Well obviously, if a greater proportion of the people around me start to talk about – and properly understand, and then act on – a better understanding of what freedom is, then it’s going to be something that improves my life. I’m not doing this for society, I’m doing it for me. It’s just coincidental, in this context, that our interests are shared.

But first there has to be some actual sharing. Do you want to share ideas? Or must you run off and go upvote some JPEGS?

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Thoughts for the week

“For the past month I have spent most of my time down in the kitchen, perfecting the scent that we are calling New Wave. You are familiar with the rationale behind New Wave. We are predicting that for many people the fascination with nostalgia - with a past reputed to be more simple, more honest, more natural than the present - will soon subside. In the cities, there is a large, affluent, professional class that has already rejected the sweet, heavy, feminine, Oriental scents that the hippies ushered into favour in the sixties, as well as the clean, wholesome, fruity and herbal scents associated with the backpacker chic of the seventies. For this avant-garde, and for those who will flock to join it, LeFever is developing New Wave, a truly modern scent - sharp, hard-edged, assertive, unisexual, urbane, unromantic, non mysterious, cool, light, elegant, and wholly synthetic...But what you don't know is how boring and, ultimately, frightening I am finding this scent. I slept last night with New Wave on my pillowcase, and my dreams were totalitarian nightmares. The boof is not unattractive, yet when I test it, I have somehow the feeling that I am smelling the sinister vapors of fascism."
~A character speaking in 'Jitterbug Perfume' by Tom Robbins
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